AI Architect

ZEISS in India ZEISS in India is headquartered in Bengaluru and present in the fields of Industrial Quality Solutions, Research Microscopy Solutions, Medical Technology, Vision Care and Sports & Cine Optics. ZEISS India has 3 production facilities, R&D center, Global IT services and about 40 Sales & Service offices in almost all Tier I and Tier II cities in India. With 2200+ employees and continued investments over 25 years in India, ZEISS’ success story in India is continuing at a rapid pace. Further information at ZEISS India. Duties and responsibilities • Act as technical product owner and lead engineer for Microsoft-based agentic AI solutions supporting REF program and portfolio management. • Take over externally and internally developed pilot components, assess their architecture and code quality, industrialize them, and establish sustainable internal ownership, documentation and support. • Design, build and maintain secure data pipelines and connectors for relevant sources such as Microsoft Teams chats and meeting transcripts, SharePoint, Excel, Jira, Azure DevOps, Smartsheet, eDMS and Polarion. • Create and maintain a common project fact base that links projects, tasks, milestones, dependencies, resources, decisions, risks, documents and meeting evidence. • Develop and orchestrate agents for project status reporting, management briefings, evidence-based Q&A, risk and dependency analysis, resource and capability planning, and scenario support. • Implement grounded retrieval, source attribution, data-quality checks and explicit gap handling so that every material output is transparent and reviewable. • Use approved Microsoft and Azure capabilities, including Microsoft 365, Teams, Power Platform, Copilot technologies, Azure AI services and Entra ID, in alignment with ZEISS architecture and security standards. • Implement identity, project-scoped authorization, audit logging, monitoring, model and prompt lifecycle management, testing, release management and incident support. • Collaborate with ZEISS IT, ZEISS Digital Partners, the MED AI Hub, data owners and tool owners to secure access, clarify interfaces and reuse existing enterprise platforms and components. • Partner closely with the Global Program Intelligence & Transformation Lead and all R&D projects to translate management questions into reliable technical products and measurable use cases. • Build reusable engineering patterns, technical documentation, runbooks and knowledge-transfer materials; coach additional engineers as the capability scales. • Continuously evaluate solution quality, cost, performance, security and user feedback and improve the platform based on evidence. Authorities • Recommend technical architecture, engineering standards and release decisions for the REF agentic AI and Portfolio Intelligence solution within approved ZEISS guardrails. • Approve technical changes and deployments within the delegated product scope and defined change-control process. • Reject integrations or agent releases that do not meet agreed security, data-quality, traceability or maintainability criteria. • Coordinate technical work packages with internal teams and approved external engineering partners. Qualifications - Graduate degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, Software Engineering, Information Systems or a related discipline. - •Typically 7+ years of hands-on experience in software, cloud or data engineering, including substantial experience designing production-grade AI, analytics or integration solutions. - Proven experience taking AI, data or software pilots from proof of concept into secure, scalable and sustainably operated production solutions. - Demonstrated experience with GenAI and agentic AI patterns, including retrieval-augmented generation, tool/function calling, orchestration, evaluation, observability and human-in-the-loop controls. - Strong practical experience with the Microsoft ecosystem, preferably Azure AI services, Microsoft 365 / Graph integration, Teams, Power Platform, Copilot technologies, Azure DevOps and Entra ID. - Strong data-engineering skills across APIs, ETL/ELT, SQL and document or semantic retrieval; experience integrating structured and unstructured enterprise data. - Strong hands-on programming skills for production AI and data integrations (for example, Python), combined with sound software-engineering practices, automated testing, CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code exposure. - Experience with secure enterprise architecture, access control, auditability, data protection and responsible AI. Experience in regulated industries or MedTech is strongly preferred. - Excellent communication skills and the ability to collaborate across India, Germany and global virtual teams. Success measures - Stable internal operation and maintainability of the solution. - Reliable, traceable access to agreed data sources with appropriate authorization and monitoring. - Accuracy, usefulness and user trust of agent-generated project and portfolio outputs. - Reduction in manual reporting effort and cycle time for management preparation. - Reuse of common components and controlled scale-up to additional REF projects and use cases. Other attributes We are looking for a hands-on builder and pragmatic problem solver, not only an AI concept expert. The successful candidate combines deep technical curiosity with production discipline, understands that enterprise AI is primarily a data, integration and governance challenge, and can translate an externally accelerated pilot into a robust ZEISS-owned capability. Willingness to learn the MedTech and REF domain is essential. Direct reports None initially; the role is expected to lead technical contributors and partners through matrix collaboration. Team build-up may follow based on scaling decisions beyond REF. Your ZEISS Recruiting Team: Saptarshi Chowdhury